CSBG Archive

Comic Book Legends Revealed #477

COMIC LEGEND: The All-New, All-Different X-Men originally were going to continue to star in Giant-Size X-Men.

STATUS: True

X-Men #95 opens with a classic splash page of the X-Men falling to seemingly their doom…

However, amazingly enough, originally that splash page was not part of the issue. That was because X-Men #95 was initially not going to exist! Well, at least not as an original issue of X-Men. You see, initially, the plan with the All-New, All-Different X-Men was that Len Wein and Dave Cockrum would continue the series in the pages of Giant-Size X-Men…

In fact, check out the last page of Giant-Size X-Men #1…

See? The NEXT ISSUE. Not “In X-Men #94.”

However, the Giant-Size titles were not doing particularly well so Marvel decided to discontinue the lesser-selling ones (and eventually all of them). Wein had the time to do a quarterly (barely, as he was extremely busy since he was Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief at the time) but when they decided to make it a regular bi-monthly title, he had to give it up. So Dave Cockrum drew a few new pages and Chris Claremont, who was scripting the series from Wein’s plots and who took over the series entirely with #96, added work as well to make the story make sense as a two-parter instead of a single issue.

It’s hard to imagine how well the book would have done had it remained just a quarterly Giant-Size title.

Thanks to Len Wein and Peter Sanderson for the information about this change from The X-Men Companion. Thanks to commenter Cerebro for sharing a quote from an interview between Claremont and the always insightful Tom DeFalco that explained why they dropped the Giant-Size format.

On the next page, check out how Don Rosa gives Mickey Mouse a bit of a hard time in his comics…

47 Comments

Fraser

I wasn’t aware “was Giant Size Xmen meant to keep running?” was even a legend, as it’s quite clear on the last page the answer is Yes. But of course that was forty years ago, and not everyone was around for it.
I do question that Wein’s schedule had anything to do with cancelling the GS book. All the GS books died around the same time–1975–so I’ve always assumed Marvel saw it as a failed experiment (I don’t remember if they gave a definite reason at the time).

renenarciso

Ted Craig

This might be worth a Legend, but it’s my understanding that the Giant-Size comics were an attempt to deal with necessary price increases without raising prices across the board. The ’69 and ’71 price hikes had devastated sales. Of course, DC actually went to the Giant Size format in ’75 with the Family titles.

GarBut

@Brian
Man, Marvel and those ’70s quarterlies. They just CRANKED them out, but almost always tied them to continuity — AVENGERS, DEFENDERS, MAN-THING… Seems like X-MEN was one of the only ones that departed from that formula, since GS2 was reprints. So, weird that Wein would have thought of that avenue as a respite.

Wire

I believe that Roy Thomas had a column in issue 1 or 2 of The Invaders explaining that the story in the first two issues of that title had to be reworked slightly to fit two issues of a regular sized comic rather than one issue of the GIant Size format, as The Invaders was originally conceived as a giant size series, also. Marvel discontinued the Giant Size line about the time they resurrected the annual format, if I’m not mistaken.

renenarciso

Fraser

You’re right, Wire–the battle against Brain Drain and his phony gods was supposed to have been GS Invaders 2.

GarBut most of the GSs used some reprint material, so it’s not surprising they’d consider All Reprint as a tactic.

Ted, DC started going big in 1973, with Detective, Batman and JLA going to 100 pages of mixed new and reprint material (other series did the format irregularly). Archie Goodwin said in detective that bigger, pricier books meant the retailer got a slightly larger cut, which would hopefully make them more attractive to stock back in the pre-comic store days.

Darth Weevil

Not that I’m a huge Mickey fan, but Rosa’s comments are a bit unfair, insofar as the early Mickey (b&w and early color) was a well-developed scamp. It was only in the 40s, as Donald shorts became more popular and as Disney started treating Mickey more as an icon than as a character, at he became boring. (A great recent example of the early Mickey is the Get A Horse short that aired theatrically with Frozen – a much more rambunctious, fun Mickey than we’ve seen in decades).

renenarciso

I don’t know if the term “Golden Age of Comics” can be applied to Disney Comics, but that is a perception problem that pretty much affects all Golden Age Comics. Golden Age stories and characterizations are seen as “not counting”.

Why?

It’s strange to me when somebody says they want Batman and Superman to return to their “true” versions, meaning the way the characters were in the 1960s. And people will get very angry and serious about it. Isn’t the Superman of 1938 as much the “true” version? The same for Batman. Those Golden Age stories are seriously undervalued.

So it’s no surprise that the more sanitized Mickey is also considered the “real” one.

JosephW

@Michael P: It’s probably less that Rosa’s unfamiliar with Gottfredson’s work, but the DIFFERENCE in how Gottfredson worked with Mickey. Gottfredson’s work was newspaper strips–almost exclusively. And while his earliest work does feature a very roguish scamp of a Mickey, by the time his work started getting reprinted in comic book form, Gottfredson was forced to tame down Mickey in much the way Darth Weevil notes.

Rosa was born in 1951–right about the time that Barks was hitting his creative high points. But if you read the Mickey Mouse COMICS that were coming out at the time, Mickey was pretty bland. (Hell, consider the mid 1960s “Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent” stories. Storywise, they’re fantastic and while it takes a little getting used to the merging of Paul Murry’s Mickey and Goofy with Dan Spiegle’s everybody else, it’s really an impressive combination–not too unlike Disney’s live-action/animation films. But the stories were a FLOP with US readers at the time. Disney took a risk with Mickey’s “goody-goody image” and got burned.) Most of Mickey’s stories were pretty standard fluff pieces in the comic books.

But why single out Rosa for his opinion when many other artists and writers express their opinions about characters they find uninteresting or banal? Watch “Robot Chicken” or “Family Guy” and see how people mock Aquaman. Yet, when the New 52 started and Geoff Johns wrote Aquaman, people *suddenly* found he wasn’t as “sucky” as pop culture to that point would indicate (and, bear in mind, that some of the best looking Aquaman artwork came from the “Aquaman sucks” era–so did the pretty classic “Death of Aquababy” story, which despite its goofy-sounding description was a pretty intense storyline, especially for the same era that produced the “Super Friends” cartoon). Hell, Erik Larsen wrote and drew the character for several years, not too long after publicly mocking Aquaman as being someone who “just talked to fish” (as well as mocking the idea that a comic could be written for someone with more than a 2nd grade reading level).

Fraser

Rene, I see a lot of fondness for the more roguish, less law-abiding Superman of the 1930s. And not that much of an urge to go back to 1960s Batman. Heck, other than the lack of the 1950s SF element, there’s not that much distinctive about the 1960s in hindsight so I’m not sure what you’d go back to.

Brian Cronin

Cerebro

Brian, you might have the facts slightly backwards on the second legend. You’re saying that Marvel changed the format of X-MEN because Wein quit. I believe it’s the other way around, Wein quit because they changed the format.

Chris Claremont on being assigned X-Men
“Len decided he’d had enough of being Editor-in-Chief. He gave notice and part of his severance package was to write four books-Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor and Hulk. Len said he could write a book a week, but X-Men would have been too much. X-Men was originally supposed to be a quarterly, which he could have handled, but then they decided that Giant Size quarterlies were not profitable. They made X-Men a bi-monthly book and Len felt he just didn’t have the space in his schedule to do it. It was also a very low profile assignment since it was only a bi-monthly title. No one had any great expectations for the book, but the new X-Men were great characters. So, God smiled and Len tossed it into my lap. It was like a dream come true.”

Rene

Yes, I said the 1960s, but we could say the 1970s, the 1980s, whatever. I agree with Darrasco, that people latch to the characters as they were in the years they were getting into comics, or perhaps the version they like that is championed by some other influential fans that lived those years. And those become the “essence” of the characters, as far as they are concerned.

But you’d have to be 70 years old to have read that first Superman story when you were 6.

Well, I guess Rosa may not have liked he Gottfredson comics or realized that Disney wouldn’t let him go back to that characterization. However, even as a “lovable scamp”, there isn’t much there (I’ll also admit that no matter how many Barks comics I read, I still see Donald as mainly a comical hothead).

Personally, I think the most interesting version of Mickey starts with the short “Runaway Brain” and goes through the run of Mickey’s Mouseworks and House of Mouse cartoons. In those cartoons, Mickey’s characterized as a fallible everyman with a notable competitive streak, a knack for getting himself in over his head and a tendency for stretching the truth to get himself out of bad situations. Not quite the lovable scamp, but a recognizably flawed and likable character. It was a big change from ‘50s Mickey whose troubles were never his own doing.

Brian Cronin

Brian, you might have the facts slightly backwards on the second legend. You’re saying that Marvel changed the format of X-MEN because Wein quit. I believe it’s the other way around, Wein quit because they changed the format.

Thanks, Cerebro, like I said in the piece, I really wasn’t sure WHY they dropped the Giant-Size format. But now I do! Thanks a lot!

apokoliptian

Fred W. Hill

Anyone who was six years old when the first issue of Action Comics came out in 1938 would have to have been born in 1932 or even 1931 and would be around 82 now. And even someone who read Amazing Fantasy #15 when it was new on the stands and cost only a dime and two pennies would be about 58 now. Of course, anyone who bought either of those mags and kept them in excellent condition could retire with a substantial profit from those purchases, but then few if any six year olds kept their comics in anyting like pristine condition.

Da Chef

sirwillingham

It seems the Danish translator might have shared Rosas sentiments towards MIckey, the American text beneath the exhibit in the museum example says “Ancient Icons” where the Danish translation says “Devil Dolls” – Or perhaps this text was edited along with Mickey for the American print?

Danny

Another thing about Rosa that I’ve noticed: I very much love his work. But in just about every interview I’ve read with him he comes off as a bit of a spaz.Very absolutist, but in a childlike way,and just a bit…off.

While it makes sense that Madrox wasn’t in GSXM because that story had actually been worked out before his first appearance in GSFF, I still think it’s a bit odd that there was a four year gap between his first appearance in GSFF and the first time Claremont featured him in X-Men. I mean, at the end of GSFF, he’s clearly shown going with Professor X, and Claremont helped write that story, so it’s not like he was unaware of it. Do we know of any reason that Madrox didn’t start showing up in X-Men? Did Claremont not like the character? It just seems odd that he would wait four years to reflect the ending of GSFF in the regular X-Men title.

Like at the end of Avengers Annual 10, when Carol Danvers is shown staying with the X-Men, it would have been odd had it taken four years for her to show up again.

@Third Man: Perhaps there just simply wasn’t any room for Chris Claremont to work Madrox into any of his early storylines on X-Men. It was a 17 page bi-monthly comic book featuring a large team made up of mostly brand new characters who needed to be developed while still leaving plenty of room for fight scenes and bad guys. That was one of the reasons why a decade later when Classic X-Men was being published Claremont jumped at the chance to write new pages and back-up stories that delved deeper into the characters, because he’d really been pressed for space to try to do that the first time around.

mr chak and al

I feel like writing an article defending Punisher and Captain America movies. The one before the X-Men, you know. Free of charge. I could write an article defending these movies for free. Pro publico bono.
You are free to contact me.
Sorry, but these legends provoked me to think about what I like in superheroes.

I will say that, as someone who stopped reading X-books in the late 1980s, I only ever knew Madrox as a Muir Island lab assistant who had a cool superpower but never did much. His development into a character that anyone could care about happened way later.

Rodan

Iam Fear

Eh, Marvel has been introducing random mutant characters -both heroes and villains- in every series for decades and many times they never show up again anywhere else.

I remember a Fantastic Four issue from the 70s where they go visit a sick kid in a hospital, and it turns out he’s a mutant who creates monstrous versions of the FF with his mind while having a fever dream that they then have to defeat. At the end, Reed says something along the lines of “I’ll refer them to Prof X”. I’m sure that never happened.

I wonder if there’s any kind of list of all those random mutants.
Of course they all got conveniently retconned out of existence after M-Day…

Yeah, but in those cases, the stories weren’t written by the X writer in the first place. Claremont co-wrote Madrox’s first appearance, a scene is shown at the end of him going off with Professor X, Claremont soon after started writing the X-Men, and it took Claremont four years to have Madrox show up. That seems like something more than simply not following up a plot thread.

Brian Cronin

But Claremont didn’t co-write the issue, he only scripted the last few pages of the Giant-Size FF #4 because Wein fell behind on schedule. One thing Wein is sort of SLIGHTLY irked at is people thinking Claremont had something to do with the creation of Madrox when he didn’t.

Anonymous

In ‘Robin Hood Rides Again‘, the second, and last, of the color Sundays volumes in Fantagraphics’ ongoing reprint of Gottfredson’s work, series editor David Gerstein writes: ‘[Frank] Reilly was manager of Disney’s Comic Strip Department at the time. As such, in 1955, he had been ordered by King Features to transform Mickey Mouse from an adventure serial into a gag strip.’ The result was that Mickey was reduced, in Gottfredson’s own words, to “just another suburbanite family man”, not a patch on the adventurous Ducks.

Rosa, who was born in 1951, grew up loving Barks’s intricate plotting (and the tight continuity of Weisinger’s Superman) in the comic books but he wouldn’t have read the comic strip epics that Gottfredson created for Mickey Mouse in the golden years of the ’30s and the ’40s.

Madrox’s second appearance was X-Men #104, two years later, then several more appearances in X-Men.

The next time he was in a non X-title was a crowd scene in the original Contest of Champions, but he really stuck to mutant books all through the ’80s (showing up in Fallen Angels, New Mutants, etc.). But even those appearances were pretty rare.

It’s wasn’t until X-Factor made him a character of interest in the 1990s that he started showing up all over the place, in Hulk, Web of Spider-Man, Moon Knight, Alpha Flight, Excalibur, FF, Wonder Man, etc.

Note: So that’s actually a two-year gap before Madrox showed up in X-Men, not the four years that Third Man refers to several times above. But it’s true that he started to show up in X-Men more frequently a couple years after that.

It's Me

I loved those quarterlies! But I understand how they failed. Before the direct market, a title that didn’t come out that often probably didn’t get stocked, so they didn’t make enough money. Marvel started mixing in reprint material to cut their cost, and the product lost value (at least in my eyes — the great part was having this double size story all under one cover) so they didn’t sell as well so they made even less money. Leading to cancellation.